“Well hello there. Looks like we’ve found ourselves a motherfucking glory hole,” Aticanda whooped.

Robert Vargas glared at the new addition to his team. Robert stood alongside Aticanda Deep, the newbie, and Aticanda’s sister, Sarita, Robert’s trusted partner. The trio stared down into a pitch black hole in the ground, a thick deciduous forest looming overhead.

“How deep you think it is?” Aticanda continued. Without waiting to get a response, he leaned over the pit and let a long loogie drip. It pooled at the center of his lips, seemingly trying to decide which fate was worse, the grizzly swirling of Aticanda’s mouth, or the mysteries down below, then it took the leap.

“Real professional there, rook. Your goddamn spit isn’t gonna tell us the first thing about how far down that hole is,” Sarita said back to Aticanda. “Quit being such a dumbass.”

“You can’t tell me what to do anymore! That’s for him to decide.” Aticanda pointed to Robert.

Sarita continued after her brother. “My name is the one on the business, not his! If I tell you to do something, you’d better fucking do it!”

Aticanda tried to come back with an insult but defeated by her logic, the boy turned to violence. He shoved her, letting loose a series of obscenities that presumably made him feel better. Caught off guard, Sarita stumbled back, bumping into Robert and nearly tumbling to the ground.

Robert had ignored the argument to that point, gazing down into the pit, but Sarita’s collision with him brought the man back into the fold. Robert didn’t have much experience around Aticanda, but even he could tell this wasn’t just some friendly sibling banter. Robert’s hand rode down to his holstered 9mm, where he cocked back the hammer, making sure the noise was audible. He kept his eyes locked on Aticanda, making it clear whose side he was on if the argument continued.

Aticanda backed off. Robert knew Sarita had shared plenty stories with the boy about Robert’s past endeavors, and Robert had a moment where he finally understood why Sarita loved to embellish.

“I don’t have time to deal with squabbling children right now. Get your shit together. We’re going down,” Robert said.

Sarita let off a triumphant grin at her younger brother. Robert muffled an urge to smile with her and lifted his hand from his gun.

Robert finally broke his eyes from Aticanda, then turned to find an anchor for his rappelling gear, dropping a subtle wink towards Sarita as he worked.

As Robert secured his rope around a massive chestnut tree, the siblings joined him in preparation to enter the hole. Sarita went about finding her own tree, but Aticanda seemed compelled to do things differently. The boy started his prep by struggling to get into his harness. Concerned, but also amused at the flailing, Robert turned to Sarita and spoke to her in a voice just quiet enough so that Aticanda wouldn’t be able to make out his words.

“Hey Sari, you sure the little man is up for this? I mean, he’s clearly got the delusional teenager’s confidence to make him willing, but he also has the delusional teenager’s confidence that makes him think he doesn’t actually need to learn how to do things.”

Sarita grimaced while she finished securing her rope. She looked up to see Aticanda hobbling on one leg, attempting to pull his other leg out of a slot meant for an arm.

She grunted as she joined in observing her faltering brother. “It’d be pretty fucking embarrassing for us if he killed himself on a dumb little extraction job, huh?”

Robert nodded in agreement as she went off to help her younger brother. The boy had been begging to come out with Robert and Sarita for years, and now that he had finally joined them, he wasn’t going to be stopped by something as trivial as not remembering how to put on an article of clothing properly. Robert still wasn’t excited about the proposition of Aticanda permanently joining the team, but if there was any positive to be found in the boy’s complete inadequacy to this point, it was that Robert now had proof that the kid needed time to mature. He wouldn’t be joining Robert and Sarita out in the field again anytime soon.

While the Deep siblings bickered about Aticanda’s lack of preparedness, Robert whipped out a flare from a compartment in his vest and dropped the bright green stick into the hole. Aticanda was caught off-guard by the sudden cackling of the flare, silencing the disagreement with his sister. Sarita kept reprimanding, but Aticanda was gone. The boy hobbled over to the hole to look down, earning more disapproval from Robert at the lack of respect for his elder. Robert kept the observation to himself though, focusing on the light down below.

The hole was several hundred meters deep, best Robert could tell, with a metallic frame creating a bottle shape that led down to the floor.

After a final safety check and a tightening of his carabiners, Robert turned to Sarita.

“You ready to tarnish all of your hard-earned rep by bringing this shitbird into the family business?” Robert pushed hard to maintain his deadpan tone.

Sarita matched her partner’s humor with a light nod and a visual examination of her brother.

“Fuck both of you,” Aticanda said, then emphatically thumped his chest and let out a whooping war call as he jumped into the hole.

Dropping the joke, Sarita responded honestly to his question. “He’s got the big, dumb balls of our father, so yeah, without question, Robert. I trust him.” Then she jumped in too.

“Family loyalty is so fucking stupid,” Robert whispered to himself, just before following suit and joining his two companions on their journey inside the Shenandoah Research Facility.

The trip to the base of the cavern was standard fare for Robert and Sarita’s line of work, but Aticanda lacked their training. He dropped far too quickly, and the combination of changing air pressure, flickering light, and hissing and shaking of the rope during his descent was enough to make the kid sick. Upon hitting the ground, he tried to rush off to solitude, but he forgot to detach first and wound up tripping over himself and puking all over his own boots.

Robert and Sarita joined him on the ground moments later, shaking their heads at the kid’s lack of situational awareness.

“Hey, Sari. Did I ever tell you about the time I made a guy shit his pants while we were playing cards?” Robert asked.

“Ah, that’s a good one. I mentioned that to Raffy one time, and he said the guy’s wife wouldn’t let him back into the house afterward. She clocked him in the face with an umbrella when he got home.”

Robert laughed. “What like an opened umbrella?”

“No, no, it was wound tight from what I hear. Got him clean in the ear.”

“Well, damn. I don’t even remember him smelling much worse than he did before.”

“Oh, no. It wasn’t the smell. It was the embarrassment. Married to a man that shit his pants in a card game? The wife was going to be the laughing stock of their community. Only way she figured people would forget about the grown man that shit his pants playing cards, was if they started remembering him as the guy whose wife openly hit him in the face with an umbrella.”

“An umbrella… What a weapon.”

Aticanda wheezed and drooled as he eventually got up. He ignored the story.

Aticanda picked up the flare and marched over to a space where a hole had been blown through the cavern wall. Robert and Sarita followed, still chuckling about the umbrella couple.

The hole was precisely the same diameter as the one from up above by Robert’s estimate. Whoever had cut the first hole had almost assuredly created this one too. Robert couldn’t decide whether the precision of these human-made holes indicated scientists trying to escape, or high-class scavengers trying to get in.

Aticanda stepped through the new hole without a second look, attempting to light the way. As Robert came in behind the kid, he could just make out what looked like a massive storage room.

Robert ignited a new flare, washing a greenish tint across the contents of a battle-torn warehouse. Skeletons littered the area, their flesh decomposed, their lab coats and businesswear still clinging to their appendages like dry paint that had dripped from its canvas. Whoever had attacked this room made sure to take out anyone and everyone. This was planned in advance, Robert thought to himself.

“Jesus Christ…” Aticanda whispered, his voice peaking at a higher point than Robert had expected he could still hit.

“This way,” Robert grunted out, before plunging past the wreckage. The three explorers drove deep into the facility, Robert driving the crew down the necessary route to the stairs. Robert had never been to this particular location, but all of the original facilities for the TechUP program had the same cookie cutter layout. Once Robert figured out where he was, he had no problem navigating them towards the vault they were looking for.

After 11 floors of stepping around massacred bodies, Robert and the Deep’s finally arrived on the hub floor. Aticanda had grimaced and twitched at each new body along the way, while Sarita kept her focus trained on pushing her brother forward. Robert was put off by the logistics of all the abandoned bodies, but the bodies themselves weren’t a reason for him to be anxious. The decomposing corpses were just a part of nature now.

Upon arriving at the hub, Sarita finally seemed to gain some recognition of where they were. “Alright! We’re getting close now, yeah?”

“Right past the decontamination ward here on our left,” Robert said, glad that Sarita had finally caught on.

“Good, good. And I assume you know what we’re looking for?”

“I’ll let you know when I see it.”

Robert and Sarita entered the hulking atrium of the hub side by side. Aticanda dragged behind. He seemed to avoid taking in his surroundings. Probably worried he would embarrass himself or stumble upon something more repulsive than the dead bodies, Robert figured.

As they walked past the decontamination ward and towards the vault room, Robert continued. “We head just through that door there, and our merch should be waiting for us. This one’s going to get you excited, Sari.” Robert couldn’t help but let some excitement creep into his voice.

“Well alright, gramps. Here’s to hoping all those dead bodies don’t mean we’re left with jack shit.”

“I told you, I’d strongly prefer if you didn’t call me gramps.”

“Right, right. My bad, Rob.”

Robert was about to protest Sarita’s continued teasing, but Aticanda broke up their banter.

“Fucking, thank god the bodies have finally cleared up.”

Robert immediately came to a stop, realizing his mistake.

“Fuck.” He reached out for Sarita, but she had already swung the door to the vault open. An explosion greeted her as flames engulfed her face, tossing her hard into Robert.

Robert slid her off and reached for his pistol, but a prick in his arm stopped his movement. Robert stared at a dart protruding from his skin. His limbs went rigid as he strained to keep his eyes from rolling back into his head. He made one last effort towards his gun, but he wasn’t even sure whether his limbs moved when he told them to. As his vision faded into nothingness, a man stepped into view, familiar, but Robert’s brain no longer held the capacity to recognize who it was.

As Robert passed out, he just made out the name “Lee” before everything went dark.

 Lakshmi’s calls to stop echoed throughout the corridor. She was too late. Mendelsohn had already left the space station.

Exhausted, Lakshmi careened to the end of docking bay 913, crashing into the railing and knocking the wind out of herself. The view from 913’s elite location would traditionally have been wondrous. Isolated at the pinnacle of the extraneous Europa Space Station port, the translucent shield doors up above opened into a luminescent view that melded the edge of Jupiter with the dazzling reflections of humanity’s countless station’s that now surrounded the planet. But it was the view of what sat inside the station that drew Lakshmi’s attention at this moment. As Mendelsohn flew off, his private galley left behind a nearly empty spaceport. There was a minimal, disparate assemblage of ships on Europa, each held together by hyper glue and prayer.

Europa was not prepared for war, no matter what claims the leadership of Enceladus had promised to Ambassador Mendelsohn. Lakshmi’s dash had likely come at the cost of her job in the transpo department, but her failure to catch up with Mendelsohn may have cost the colony of Europa its existence.

The hopelessness of the station’s pseudo-fleet left Lakshmi feeling weak. Her selfishness had slowed her down, and now these people were doomed because she had been concerned about maintaining personal diplomatic relationships. She stepped away from the railing, trying to catch her breath. She needed to speak with Rin. Rin would know what to do. She trained her eyes on the mid-levels of the port, searching for any of the entertainer’s associates that she might recognize from Rin’s get-togethers. But as Lakshmi scanned the decks, she was startled out of her thoughts by a metallic pounding approaching from behind.

She turned to find two huge men sprinting down the corridor straight for her, their plodding footsteps reverberating throughout the passageway. Panicked, Lakshmi’s instincts told her to run, but she had nowhere to go but over the railing. At least against the massive men she had a slightly better chance than a hundred yard drop. Lakshmi whipped out a utility tool from her belt as the two men came to a standstill in front of her. Anxious for the men to make their move, Lakshmi’s fingers twitched at her side. But the men just stared, weapons in-hand, forcing her to make the first step. She let out a scream and leaped forward, incapable of waiting any longer.

The men evaded her with ease, and Lakshmi fumbled into an awkward somersault as she dove between them. She lost purchase of her tool and stumbled out of her roll. Now past the men, she saw an opportunity to run and took it.

At the far end of the corridor, a dock worker went about her typical menial tasks. As Lakshmi ran, she tried to call out to the worker, but Lakshmi’s screams caught in her throat as something struck her in the back, sending her body into convulsions as she collapsed on the floor.

In the distance, Lakshmi could just make out the dock worker heading off to the next station, blissfully unaware, as Lakshmi blacked out.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Lakshmi awoke, curled up in a sweaty ball, surrounded by the vast, blackness of space.

A string of profanities flowed from her mouth as her mind told her she was dive-bombing through nothingness.

Until she realized that she could hear the sound of her voice.

She tried to unfurl herself but she was paralyzed.

Lakshmi looked around to discover that she was trapped in a cell. The room provided just enough space to either stand or lay down, but neither comfortably. Each surface that surrounded her was made of a thin glass, save for the wall she leaned against, which was actually a door, freckled and whitened with age and exposure to light. In the center of the door sat a small black screen.

Lakshmi continued swearing until an abrupt beeping noise interrupted her. She looked up to find that the screen had turned on and a woman was staring down at Lakshmi.

“Good evening, Ms. Sharma.” The woman greeted Lakshmi with a pleasant voice, her harsh suit and loosely styled hair creating a whirlwind of contradiction.

“I… Who the hell are you?” Lakshmi’s confusion and discomfort got the better of her as she managed a meek response.

“Well, I’m glad to see your inquisitiveness has not left you Ms. Sharma, but those sort of questions are what got you into trouble in the first place, are they not?”

The woman paused for a second and Lakshmi turned away, trying to hide her contempt as she ran through the list of who this woman might be. She wasn’t from the transpo department, and wasn’t a part of Mendelsohn’s team as far as Lakshmi knew. Someone from Earth trying to torture her for information? Lakshmi wished Rin were there. Rin knew everyone.

The woman continued, “Who I am is not important here. Our potential shared cause is. Unfortunately, you have put your personal interests in front of the citizens of Europa. Now, with most people, we wouldn’t care. If an ice-picker thinks their gambling addiction is more important than our resources then we need to take care of them, but we do not actually care about that specific ice-picker. We can replace that moron in an instant. But you? Well, your skill set is a little more difficult to replace.”

Lakshmi looked back into the screen with a half-smile on her face, the woman’s verbalization of Lakshmi’s skill giving her confidence.

“Yeah, I’m pretty good at what I do.”

“Agreed. That’s why you only woke up feeling as though you were drifting through space instead of actually doing it. We need you to help us deal with the Enceladus Rebellion. From the inside”

Lakshmi was about to tell the woman she might not even have her job anymore, but caught herself.

“How about you let me out of my cell then? I’d be happy to talk.”

The woman nodded her head, feigning thought before speaking again. “Yes. I will have the guards open the door for you.”

Lakshmi’s upper body smashed into the floor as the door opened, removing her support. Dazed, Lakshmi tried to roll over, but couldn’t. A pair of guards, a man and a woman stood above the sprawled-out Lakshmi.

“We can help with that newly-acquired ailment too.” The woman watched inquisitively from the half-opened door’s screen. “We have already arranged a meeting for you in a couple of minutes. We would prefer that you be able to walk in of your own accord, but if you are not going to cooperate, we are happy to carry you in. It is very important that you earn our trust, Ms. Sharma.”

Lakshmi’s gaze drifted back towards her body as she stared at her helpless limbs. And then she threw up.

Golden chunks all over her stomach and legs, Lakshmi didn’t even have the energy to swear.

“God damnit.” Her captor still possessed it though. “Well, I guess you have found a way to avoid meeting our terms. Congratulations, Lakshmi.” Speaking to the guards, “inject her now and get her cleaned up for her appointment with Captain Chong.”

The screen turned black, as Lakshmi continued to stare at nothing in particular, eyes glazed over.

Lakshmi tried to look up as the guards moved in on her, but her eyes couldn’t focus. Lakshmi’s face felt as though a magnet was pulling it through her skull and into the ground. She struggled to stay conscious. Voices rang hollow in the background. Empty words drifted past as she began to fade, her senses all but gone.

And then a jolt to her left temple.

Her hearing came back instantly as a woman’s deafening voice tore through Lakshmi’s consciousness.

“-her up, come on. We’ll inject her again once she’s clean.”

Lakshmi opened her mouth to call the guards off, but the utterances sounded more like a call for help than a threat. Weak, blind, and completely helpless, Lakshmi was hoisted off the floor and into a hard metal seat. Her body slumped over, Lakshmi started to be able to wiggle her fingers and smell the puke all over her. The seat glided forward as the guards took her down a lengthy hallway.

At the end of the hall, they took a hard turn into a small room and the male guard stepped in front of her as the doors shut behind them.

He hit a button and tried to slide back behind the seat, but got tripped up, stumbling onto Lakshmi’s outstretched, puke-ridden legs.

The sudden pressure jolted Lakshmi upright, and despite her blurred vision she decided to make a move. Lakshmi thrusted her body toward the closed doors, just as the room dropped, and the elevator began carrying the trio downstairs.

The male guard slammed into the doors as Lakshmi flipped on top of him. Grunts echoed from both, as the female guard yelled out at them.

Lakshmi flailed her arms, reaching for anything, unable to see clearly in the monochromatic elevator. The now-empty seat lurched down at the base of the elevator doors as Lakshmi was pushed up by the male guard. A crunching sound erupted from below her and a spray of blood spit across Lakshmi’s face. The male guard screamed as he was hammered by the weight of the seat.

The female guard yelled out too, this time in terror at her own actions. Rolling down off the man, Lakshmi pushed the seat back where it came from, cutting off the female guard’s scream mid-exhale. Lakshmi kept pushing, a squelching sound now coming from the woman until a series of cracks exploded from her and the seat lurched back again. Lakshmi crashed back with it, falling face first onto the floor and into a pool of blood.

Lakshmi scrambled, away from the seat and into a corner, where the male guard lay opposite her, whimpering.

Lakshmi sat soaked in blood, puke, and sweat, the world now a red-stained blur. She wiped the blood from her eyes to discover that her visual acuity was finally returning.

And suddenly she wished it wasn’t. The male guard lay in tears, pushed up into a corner, his arms covered in blood, and one of his legs abandoned by the elevator doors.

Lakshmi stared in horror at the limb, not daring to see what had happened to the other guard. And then the doors opened and the one-legged guard opened his mouth to scream, but nothing came out. He tipped over, mouth agape, lost to shock.

Lakshmi sat frozen until finally she peeled herself off the floor, strands of blood still connecting her to the glossy metal. Her senses all returned to her, she poked her head out of the elevator. With nobody in sight, she exited, taking slow, squelching steps past room after room until she found a dead end with a pair of huge double doors. Lakshmi turned to retreat, but the double doors flew open and a slight man greeted her.

“Ms. Sharma, good evening. Oh…” The man was thrown by the state of her being, but continued nonetheless with a frown now displacing the cheery professionalism of his initial words. “Captain Chong has been waiting for you to start the meeting. If you would please take a seat, the gathered members of the new board can begin speaking on the terms of how to quell this rebellion against the motherland.”

Mendelsohn had done it then. Europa and Enceladus were going independent of Earth and they were going to do it with violence.

Lakshmi stepped into the room, confused and exhausted, but willing to do what was necessary to stop the war.

“Are you writing all this down, Lilith?”

“I, uh… yes! Of course, I’m writing it down. Come on, God. I’m just as perfect as you are. I wouldn’t screw up doing my only job.”


“Good.” God paused for a moment, pensive, ignoring Lilith’s perfection quip. Lilith scrambled to find a pen at her workstation, getting started on her note-taking. “Because when one of my creatures finally beats this game, I’d like them to be able to see how it all started.”

God cackled as she thought about the idea.

“Who do you think it will be Lilith? What creature is going to bumble its way into discovering us first?”

As she fervently tried to backtrack and write down God’s dialogue from the last ten minutes, Lilith submitted a beast of her own design in response to God’s question.

“Well, I quite like pigs, God. They’re smart, and tough, and they’ve got plenty of fat to keep warm. I bet they’ll-”

“Wrong!”

God’s voice reverberated throughout the chamber, a hollowed out rock that Lilith had procured with God’s guidance. God had suggested a star as the home field for her laboratory of conception, but Lilith argued against it. A fiery ball of energy capable of sustaining life hardly felt like the humble point of origin that Lilith had imagined. Instead, she and God decided on this rock, where the pair now worked in preparation for the spawning party.

The first couple day’s of God’s creation had been a bit hectic and unsuccessful. This rock was just one of millions that had been spinning out of control for quite some time. God had experimented with all kinds of celestial bodies, but most of what she came away with was a cluster of gas clouds and a bunch of boulders hurtling through the blackness in every direction. It took a while for God to calibrate the laws of how the universe worked, so a ton of the locations where she had planned on putting life were destroyed before she even had a chance to do anything with them. Next time she would have to remember not to get ahead of herself. Laws of the universe come first, then the existence of the universe.

But, by the end of the second day, God had finished establishing the way things would work. Although, God had given some responsibility to Lilith which resulted in some unfortunate decisions. Mostly God was upset at Lilith for screwing up the installation of time. Making time linear was going to be a huge pain in the ass, but there was no going back now. Because Lilith had made time linear.

But now the pair of them were ready to get to work on the real fun. God had built her canvas, and now, here on day 3, she was ready to play. God and Lilith had been up all night making plans for the life forms they wanted to create, and God was itching to get started, beginning with a discussion of who was the better designer.

“The chance that pigs wind up being the dominant species in this universe is negligible. I am pulling for the Gramulons,” God declared.


“Gramulons…?”

Lilith reached out for God’s stack of blueprints, hoping to find out what the hell a Gramulon was. She shuffled through the stack as God began to ramble about her impending victory in what she had titled the “Creature Creation Accreditation Contest.”

“The Gramulons are the perfect entities. As we were working I never actually scrapped anything I created. I figured we could just let the critters get all swallowed up if we did not like them anyways, so I just kept adapting my future creatures into being able to kill whatever I had come up with previously. Now, you see, the Gramulon’s are great, not because they are the strongest, or the smartest necessarily, but because they are not bogged down by-“


“Hey!” Lilith interjected into God’s spiel. “This “warthog” thing looks an awful lot like my pig. Except… you gave it little knives on its face for stabbing. That’s not very nice, God…”

“Warthog? I don’t even know what that-”

God snatched the paper Lilith was holding from her.

“Oh. This thing. Yeah, whatever. I already designed its successor. Did you see the next one? “Hippopotamus” I call it. Such a fun name to say. It will come in and take care of both pigs and warthogs if there is ever any sort of conflict between the species. So, now back to a creation that actually matters. As I was saying-“

“You can’t just copy all of my stuff and make it better. That’s not fair, God.”

“Lilith, can you just let me talk about my Gramulons, please? I really just want to tell you about the Gramulons. I think you will find them to be pretty wonderful if you just give them a chance.”

Rolling her eyes, Lilith accepted her fate. If God wanted to tell her about the Gramulons, there wasn’t much she could really do.

“Fine, God. Tell me about them.”

“Excellent! Well, as I was saying before. What makes the Gramulons so perfect is not that…”

Lilith spaced out as God rambled on about her creation. Lilith didn’t much care. Naming the pig her animal of choice had just been a diversion anyway. And God totally bought it. While God was focusing on her Gramulons and her warthogs and her hippopotamuses, Lilith was going to put all of her efforts into something she was building right underneath God’s nose: humans.

And so while God blabbered, Lilith continued to prepare her blueprint.

God wouldn’t notice them at first. Lilith would start them off insignificant. They wouldn’t have the intelligence to create large permanent settlements or the emotional capability to not kill foreign groups of the species upon first contact, but they would breed and they would overcome their trials of new existence. It would take time, but humanity would rise to the top, to create a dominant species that would be able to rule the universe with intellect, and poise.

Or they would all kill themselves. Maybe designing humans to be so unempathetic and greedy wasn’t the best move for creating a peaceful creature to rule the universe.

“Lilith!”

She snapped to attention as God called out her name.

“You’ve stopped writing. Keep writing. I want my full faith in the Gramulons to be documented for when they finally get here.”

“Right. Of course. I’m getting it all down, don’t worry.”

But Lilith wasn’t getting it all down. She was continuing to make alterations to humanity as God droned on about how her Gramulons were going to win. Her creatures were going to win. She was sure of it.

"Say goodbye to your money fellas. I'll call."

A smirk weaseled onto Martin's face as he dumped his chips into the center of the table. A belligerent celebration ensued as the young boy taunted each of his competitors, sneering and making jabs about their lack of skill. The man across from him, Seth Concepcion, was the only one who didn't look back at Martin with hatred in his eyes. Instead, Seth kept his gaze on the man to Martin's left.

As Martin completed his victory tour of the other player's faces, he locked eyes with the man who Seth had been watching. The man eased out of his chair, revealing a frame that overwhelmed Martin's presence in an instant. The man unholstered his firearm and blasted a hole through Martin's neck.

The sound of screaming quickly overtook the live band as the bar's tenants recoiled from the murder. But nobody made a move to stop the shooter.

Martin tried to scream too, but a hopeless gurgling was all that emitted from the dying boy's throat. He collapsed, flailing as blood gushed from the wound, commingling with green felt of the poker table. His cards, now smeared with crimson red blotches of blood, revealed that Martin had been buffing. His hand was nothing but a pair of fours. Not that anyone was paying attention to Martin's cards at the moment.

The shooter placed his gun back in its home and observed what he had done to the room. The crowd was reeling, but the safety of his family name would protect the man. It didn't matter if they despised him, as long as they knew who he was.

While Martin began convulsing, falling off of his chair, the shooter placed his cards face down on the table. He contemplated grabbing the chips before simply turning to the dealer and demanding his payout. The dealer hastily obliged and the shooter walked out the front door, tipping his hat to the bartender as he left.

With Martin now dead and the shooter gone, Seth finally stood up from the poker table. The rest of the crowd began to quiet down, recognizing his lanky frame and full mustache. Seth curled in his lips as he thought, staring down at the corpse of Martin. After a few moments, he flipped out his wallet, dropped a stack of cash in front of the stunned dealer, and grabbed ahold of Martin's arms, dragging him out the back door. Seth rested Martin up against a grimy wall, took several paces away from him, and spun back to look at the lifeless Martin. "Sorry, old friend," he whispered, before firing a pair of bullets into Martin's body. Martin flopped over as more blood squirted out onto the floor of the alley.

Seth frowned to himself and lit up a cigarette. A couple of months ago this would have been an arrest, not a coverup. He spent a minute smoking, and then pulled his sheriff's badge out of his pocket and fastened it to his lapel. He walked back out of the alley to meet his deputy out front.

His suit now drenched in blood, Seth was hoping his deputy would at least share some of his recently-acquired payout. If you're going to be dirty, you might as well get some extra cash out of it. This new royal regime wasn't exactly working out for the everyman, but that didn't mean Seth couldn't make it work in his favor on occasion.